Heaven and hell.
It's been some time, real life kicked in on me heavily again. As a consequence there was hardly any progress during the last weeks. The last feature I worked on was the portal scope system. I can promise that if you see the first video of it you will sh* your pants. Basically, the portal scopes were merged with the new weapon mechanics code and they now move full 3D like all the other sights even in free look. CQB will feature a 1.5x ACOG (yes, the magnification is only in the scope) and 4x Leupold and PSO scopes with full realistic eye relief, field of view and exit pupil simulation.
That was heaven.

Heaven and hell is the release of ET Gnu GPL. This was expected and only a matter of time. It was also something I had in the back of my mind when I came back to work on CQB with the idea to develop it for fun for LAN parties. I was thinking that ET would be GPLed at some point when CQB game would have been finished and running for stock ET and I could then toy around with the engine, merging some features of my Q3 engine improvements. Additionally, cheating doesn't matter for my own LAN parties.
Now we have a new situation, CQB will go public, I guess PB will stop supporting ET in the near future and CQB is not finished, so I'll better not start to look at the engine. Of course I couldn't stop myself from downloading ET engine and from running CQB on my own engine compile. Moreover, I tried some small changes, mainly tried to understand some of the engine bugs and so on.
Nevertheless, I will again focus on developing CQB and will not touch the engine. In addition, I want to motivate interested and skilled coders to think about a future cheat protection. Even if CQB will be played with the stock ET engine officially, I guess nobody will be able stop hackers from using their own engine compile in the near future.

Well, blog time again. Sorry for the long waiting time, but real life limited my attention to CQB. So, what happened in the dev department?
I've finished the weapon selection for the first version including all first-person and third-person models. Although I am not fully satisfied, I will stop working on weapons now since all future changes require more in-depth code changes. As mentioned in my last blog entry, one new optics in CQB will be the ACOG 1.5x CQC scope. Taken together, CQB will feature three reflex optics (Osprey, Aimpoint, and Eotech) and three lens optics, being Acog (1.5x) and PSO and Leupold (4x). The current weapon system allows to select a certain optic for a specific weapon and/or a suppressor. Two new weapons I added are short-barreled 5.56mm ones, namely the SCAR mod 16 CQC (Specops) and SG-552 SWAT (Terrorists). I decided for the SCAR in favor of the M4 to avoid another AR-15 based weapon. These two weapons can be equipped with the Eotech red-dot sight. The longer barreled assault rifles (Rec7 and AK-47) offer the ACOG scope.
I am currently working on sounds and the next step is to finish the unaimed weapon mechanics, i.e., I have to finish the free-aim code for the unsighted weapon position and I will most likely remove the xhair again.
After some recombination of the player skins (terror will also look like a military force), a first test version could be released but will then use the old maps and old gametypes. First thoughts about gametype changes are 3-minute rounds for Demolition and re-rounds (switching the role of teams, like in RtCW and MW2). Another step would be removal of rounds for respawn modes since there is no round-dependent weapon availability anymore. Besides Bodycount, I currently favor Capture-and-hold as additional respawn mode.

Hi again. Although my plan was to stop working on weapons, I nevertheless finished all weapons that I had in mind for the final release. Some models and animations are not optimal yet, but at least the very first version would ship with a decent selection already and balancing can already be based on the final range of weapons.
As a reminder, CQBs weapon selection is based on the idea to offer weapons with unique behaviour (calibre, rate of fire, barrel length) and addons instead of a huge arsenal with many functionally similar models. As such CQB offers six team dependent choices for the primary weapon (to keep TC(E)s flavor of unique teams) and six common choices for the secondary weapon. The last weapons I've added are the M3 Super 90 and SPAS-12 shotguns with suppressor and choke disperser as attachments, and the double-barreled sawn-off shotgun with akimbo addon, as well as the Desert Eagle (still old model) and the Glock 21 with suppressor as addon (current placeholder for the 1911 Para Ordnance).

Still alive. Just wanted to drop by and assure everybody that I am still on this project. However, real life has been kicking hard and CQB progress is very limited except for some minor tweaking.

Actually, I've noticed that I declared the weapon selection finished for two posts already, but, guess what, this will be another time about weapons ...

The reason why I am reiterating the weapon selection once more is that I was not satisfied with the current internal handling which doesn't allow any further addons without major recoding anymore. In connection to this, I would very much like to deliver the final state of the equipment system already with the first release, since the past told us that further massive changes are very unlikely to happen :) .
Well, I think I've now found an easy way out which requires little coding and gives the option for a number of alternative sights being used as addon on the individual weapons. It also allows me to add two more weapons, most importantly my favorite AKS-74U. It will be complemented by another 8 inch barreled weapon, the KAC PDW for Specops. Finally it also leaves two free spots for bolt-action rifles (eg. M24 SWS and TRG-42) which I will, however, not implement now.

Time to report again. There was some slow but steady progress with CQB during the last weeks. As indicated in my last blog entry, I did some final touches to the internal weapon handling. There are now plenty of free slots for future weapon addons and I will not have to recode the whole system later on. Along with these changes there was also some tweaking of the gear, attachment, and ability system. As before, there are primary, secondary, and grenade slots, in addition to the new primary attachment slot, a combat ability slot and a physical ability slot. The primary attachment slot has the options extra mags, high-grade ammo, and muzzle attachment (suppressor or choke disperser for shotguns). These attachments will be dropped and picked up with the primary weapon. The combat and physical abilities stay as planned and will be finished in the next week.

I did some tweaking in the sidearm section where the Beretta 93R (+Akimbo) was replaced against a regular Beretta 92 (+Akimbo) and instead the Glock 18 is now available for spending one credit point for a sidearm. The Akimbo 93R was just spraying too many bullets at a combined fire rate of 2400 RPM.

My plan is to play a first version of CQB at a private LAN party we have at the end of the year. I order to be able to play, I will have to finish the integration of the abilities and will then have to work on the test map. Sounds doable for some x-mas holiday spare time. This will be a one map version then and I hope that I can aim for an initial public release afterward.

I wish everybody a happy x-mas and new year and be patient with CQB :)

Well, unfortunately I didn't get around to finish a first version of CQB for the x-mas holiday LAN party. Nevertheless, the LAN party was massive fun, mainly Cod4, Cod5 Zombies, and UT3.
I managed to finish the ability system but I was not able to work on the map. So, pretty much the mapping and the final packaging are left. I will try continuous integration of the missing map features and will stop the earliest possible moment. For the packaging I will opt for a release independent of TCE pak files. This means some more work but it will reduce the mess with different alpha and beta and game versions. I will also include the map source and everything required for map compile (tweaked q3map2) including all models and the appropriate batch for QCB map compile.
After the LAN party, I got side tracked a bit and played around with a cel shaded (toon) version of QCB with actually fantastic visual results. The aged edgy player models and anims as well as the missing pixel shaders somehow cry out for toonish visuals when compared to up-to-date engines and make the whole combo really look like it was exactly meant to be like this. I might develop this into a minimod (please spare rants and raves), but currently only use the altered HDR effect and the possibility for color toned post processing which can be used to alter the color style and thus the atmosphere of a map (like used in UT3, MW2, and Cod5, ...)

Back for some news. Hell, I haven't converted CQB to cel shading yet :). Actually, I rather deactivated it again, at least for now. The focus stays on a first playable version and a cel shaded minimod or a conversion of the whole project would have been way too much work right now. One other issue is that the Q3-type cel shading (with use of backfaces) adds a lot of polys, on average 25-30% in a scene, if world, playermodels and weapons are cel shaded.
I mainly did some mapping and minor code tweaks as well as some tweaking of the player skins. That's it already for today.

Wrapping up.
At least I am at it right now. Looking back to when I started this thread, I though it would be a good time to finally freeze development for a while.
I mainly did some mapping during the last weeks. I am not really finished, nor fully satisfied with the result, but from now on I will only add some details and whatever is required for an alpha release. As a highlight I wrote a custom tool to blend and stitch sky renderings from the free version of Terragen 2 (kick ass) to gain very detailed and impressing 1024x1024 pixel skybox images after hours of rendering.
Last weekend I did the first packaging and ended up in about 300 Megs for the alpha. I am too lazy to further remove unreferenced content from the pak files, I guess 300 Megs are ok for a download. Of course, WET is required, too.
Codewise, I mainly wiped some remaining glitches and I have to do a new linux compile. I hope to make some steady progress during the next weekends.

Well, things are shaping up faster then I hoped and I am now safe to announce that the CQB Alpha will be ready for release anytime between next weekend and March 31.

During the last days, I was able to finish a lot of all these small bits that were left, like changing the game name, menus, credits, transition from TC:ELITE to TC:CQB in the artwork, etc. I got the release chain running including the linux compile and I already verified the first feature complete package on a linux server and windows client. Now some finishing touches to the map are required and some further testing.

In short, I want to address what you can expect from the alpha release:

Well, a release with mixed feelings from my side. I can see that new physical player movement system (PPMS) that basically constraints all movements and turning to what is possible in real life, is perceived as clumpsy and 150-kg like. On the other hand, it works perfect and I couldn't see any bullshit spin-jump tactics on servers. It is obvious that the PPMS is indeed quite different to most other FPS shooters, mostly to idtech movement. There is for sure headroom for tweaking. One big question, however, remains: will CQB be powerful enough to attract (new) players that percieve more realistic movement as a nice feature?

First off, I'd like to thank everybody for constructive criticism and suggestions. As you may guess, I will not be able to address all suggestions and to please everybody. However, I carefully read all your comments.

One thing in advance, those who want nothing else like wild lean-jump-turn action will never get pleased with any future CQB version. If you feel like that then maybe Urban Terror or another game will appear more to you.

There are actually two major bugs which I have already addressed and a new version will come this week:

a) The random spawn was indeed unintentionally random and now it will spawn you farthest from all enemies, typically somewhere on the periphery of the map.

b) I noticed only one who mentioned it, but the sprint speed is way too high (about 20%). It will be back to the intended sprint speed (same as in TC:E) in the future. The accelaration will be slightly faster, adjusted to the lower maximum speed.

Along with some other bugfixes I have increased the run speed by 10%.
Overall, speeds are comparable to Americas Army 2.x, Arma2 and slightly slower then HL2:Insurgency.

One other issue is the fov. I can see that people playing on a 4:3 screen might complain about to limited fov atm and I will address this. What I wanted to avoid is to have to tweak a wide variety of different fov's. CQB will offer fovs that fit the typical viewing angle of a computer screen (which is clearly not in the region of >= 90 deg Q3 fisheye view)

I hope I've busted the erratic spawn behavior finally. I really hope so. All my extended inhouse test are fine now. What I really like is the new death effect which lets the first person view tumble and fades the vision. Not much more then in other modern games but much improved over the previous third person view after death.

Another issue I have addressed is that distant fire sounds were not transmitted when they were not in the PVS of the player. Thus sometimes sounds from the inside of buildings or from the other side of a building were not audible that would for sure be audible IRL. This created a lack of battle awareness, cause a corner of the map could be silent with a huge fire fight on the other side of a building.